CALDWELL, Ohio — Other than to acknowledge his mother’s occasional words of encouragement, an
Akron-area teenager accused of helping a man in a bizarre robbery and murder plot said nothing at a
court hearing yesterday.

Led by Noble County Sheriff Stephen Hannum, 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty shuffled into the Common
Pleas courtroom in a blue windbreaker with his head bowed and his hands cuffed in front of him.
Rafferty is accused of assisting Richard J. Beasley, 52, of Akron, in luring at least two men to
the county through an online ad for a fictitious farm job with the intent of robbing and killing
them.

Rafferty’s hearing yesterday was to determine whether his case would be bound over to adult
court. But in about five minutes, Assistant Prosecutor Kelly A. Riddle asked that the matter be
postponed in light of new juvenile-court charges that were filed against Rafferty last week. The
teen now faces delinquency counts of aggravated murder and complicity to aggravated murder in
addition to initial juvenile-court charges of attempted murder and complicity to attempted
murder.

Judge John W. Nau granted the request and returned Rafferty to the Muskingum County juvenile
detention center in Zanesville, where he has been held since his arrest on Nov. 16. A new court
date has not been set.

According to a complaint filed in the case, Rafferty was with Beasley when he met with two men,
Scott Davis of South Carolina and 51-year-old David Pauley of Norfolk, Va., on separate occasions
in Marietta. Both men drove with Beasley and Rafferty to a secluded area of Noble County,
supposedly to visit the farm.

Davis escaped but was shot in an arm on Nov. 6. He had become suspicious and run from the pair
just before he was shot. Rafferty was charged with juvenile counts of attempted murder and
complicity to attempted murder in that case. Pauley’s body was found on Nov. 15 in a grave near
where Davis was shot. Pauley had been killed by a gunshot in the head.

Rafferty’s most-recent charges, filed on Nov. 22, are for that killing.

Beasley has not been charged in connection with the deaths but is being held on a $1 million
bond on unrelated prostitution charges.

Two more bodies were found by authorities on Friday, including that of Timothy Kern, 47, of
Massillon, who had been buried in a wooded area near an Akron shopping mall.

Like Pauley, Kern had answered the fake job ad posted on Craigslist, and he also was killed with
a gunshot to the head.

Questions remain about the third body, which was found on Friday in the heavily wooded area of
Stock Township in Noble County where Pauley was buried and Davis shot.

A preliminary autopsy report released yesterday by the county coroner’s office found that a “
John Doe” had died of a gunshot to the head.

However, the report also noted that the body could be that of Ralph Geiger, pending fingerprint
checks with the FBI and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

The report did not list an address or age for Geiger, or how authorities came up with his
name.

Michelle Y. Rafferty, Brogan Rafferty’s mother, was at the court hearing yesterday to console
her son and profess his innocence.

“We’re praying for the families and the victims,” she told reporters after the hearing. “God
bless you all. Do the right thing. Get the truth.”

Ms. Rafferty had told the Associated Press this week that “my son is not a monster.”

And though she stopped short of saying he had provided the tips on the whereabouts of the
bodies, she did say he “has told everything he knows.”